Quotes About Character

He lost the great big outward thing, the good- looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brillian mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue yes, those beautiful hands.

Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen. Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you've dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters … you at least give them a shot at it, because … just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist.

In general, though, there's no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. Sometimes

If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you'll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.

We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

In general, though, there's no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

It means, of course, that when you don't know what to do, when you don't know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do.

he gets this glinty Donald Trump look in his eyes, like in the old cartoons where someone gets a greedy brainstorm, blinks, and we hear the sound of a cash register and see the dollar signs in his eyes.

When is a legend legend? Why is a myth a myth? How old and discussed must a fact be for it to be relegated to the category Fairy-tale? And why do certain facts remain incontrovertible while others lose their validity to assume a shabby, unstable character?

One renegade can discredit a hundred honest injuns.

And she was attractive. She had an unusual mixture of innocence and individuality. A man who loved her might waken all kinds of passions in her, and high among them would be loyalty.

chin and nose. He wore the cap tilted at such an angle that the lower half of his face was visible, and his gap-toothed smile was the first thing one saw of him.

He was a man of absolutes, he had been for as long as she had known him, and time had deepened his character rather than mellowed it. He was wiser, more mature in judgment and temper than in his youth, but in the last analysis his heart would always rule his head. He was the stuff of crusaders, and of martyrs.

she hated the streak of cruelty she knew in him, the arrogance, the frequent insensitivity. And he was a fool where judgment of character was concerned. He could no more read a woman's wiles than a dog could read Spanish! He was consistently attracted to the very last sort of woman who could ever make him happy.

The essence of strength is not in overpowering others, but in mastering oneself.

Handsome people are often extremely selfish. To be able to charm others is very dangerous to the character. It comes as a shock, sometimes an unacceptable one, to find there is something you want and you may not have it.

there are none as virtuous as those who have never been asked.

Oi didn't loike that bloke, Captain. Bastard, 'e were, but Oi s'pose rules is for them yer don't loike. Yer won't 'urt them as yer do. In't that what God's about, been fair to them as rubs your coat all the wrong way?

rare courage, and a force of character

I was good and bad, but never wicked.

I am not times fool, nor a god hardened by the millennia; I am not the trickster in the black cape nor the sorrowful wanderer. I have a conscience. I know right from wrong I know what I do and yes, I do it. I am the Vampire Lestat. That's your answer do with it as you will.

you do get wiser when you live for hundreds of years; but you also have more time to turn out as badly as your enemies always said you might.